Carnage (2011)

If Roman Polanski's new film Carnage were a thesis film, arguing that (to quote A.O. Scott), "beneath the surface of civilized behavior lurks an unquenchable animal impulse, a principle of aggression we labor in vain to suppress"--then it would be a pretty bad movie. It's a dumb premise. What is truly awful and uncanny about human indecency and cruelty is (to quote Nietzsche) "human, all too human." Civilization is not built on some successful-but-fragile renunciation of primal violence, but is indeed founded on primal violence (Freud); "discontent" (Unbehagen) is not lurking in the shadows of our primeval natures, but is built into the bitter, vicious circle we know as culture.

We don't get a glimpse behind any curtain here. Although a piece of theater very much in the vein of Sartre's No Exit or Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Carnage isn't interested in dredging up the past. There is no rotating set of monologues that walks us through the moment when each character became fixed in their rut or left to cling to a pipe dream. Nor will "everything be different" for these characters going forward: truth has not emerged to shatter their world.

This isn't mere clunkiness in the script. In refusing to bare for us each character's inner drives, failings, and obsessions, Carnage is much closer to Bergman's episodic, inconclusive Scenes From a Marriage than to the catharsis and soul-bearing of the mid-century stage. Not only do these characters not have discernible, rich pasts--their tantrums and excoriations turn only around sarcastic, shallow perceptions. It is a virtue of the film, not a flaw, that the viewer believes less and less of what any character says, as things get darker and more apparently confessional. We only hear the particular lies that these people tell themselves. John C. Reilly plays at being a nihilist; Kate Winslet pursues a tangent about the sanctity of a hamster's life; Christoph Waltz spends the entire film in another reality (his cell phone); and Jodie Foster's awkwardly tries to get hammered. None of this is wending our way through the defiles of some profound truth of these characters; it is all quite forced on their parts.

The great insight of psychoanalysis is that, at some level, whatever deformation and distortion our activities may take on, this is how we get off. The most crippling hysteria is just the way one person organizes their satisfactions. Applied to Carnage, you might say that these characters are living for this: to trot out these petty, shallow, execrable figures of themselves to wallow in, parading a shameful cynicism and sarcasm. There is an obvious glee to it, even an addictive compulsion. Far from being a "one-off," you get the feeling that everyone would be better off if they could institutionalize these afternoons together. The mask of social convention isn't ripped off here against anyone's will: these characters plunge into their degradation with enthusiasm. It is a kind of holiday: the ideological fantasy of, "When I am awake, am I really a butterfly dreaming I am a philosopher?" The answer of course is, no. No more do these Brooklyn bourgeois need some *additional* flavoring of the atrocious to serve as their tombstone... nor as their alibi.

A Dangerous Method (2011)

Plato's Symposium is a critical text for psychoanalysis. Freud bases his formulation of the death drive, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, on Aristophanes' myth of a primal division at the root of sexual desire. "Love wants to heal the wound in human nature." And Lacan bases his entire seminar (VIII) on transference upon this dialogue.

But the Symposium interests us here not for its doctrinal value, but as a literary text, even as a drama. In the speeches here, you don't just hear a succession of abstractions, relics of 5th century Athenian social opinion. You also receive an impression of what Georg Lukacs calls the characters' "intellectual physiognomy": "What is decisive is that Plato reveals the thinking processes of his characters and develops their varied intellectual positions regarding the same problem--the nature of love--as the vital factor in their characters and as the most distinctive manifestation of their personalities... A character's conception of the world represents a profound personal experience and the most distinctive expression of his inner life."

A Dangerous Method takes as its subject the break (1911 and prior) between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, and the widening cracks in their theoretical approaches which would yield such vastly irreconcilable results in the following decades. The central conversation in the film, the 13-hour first meeting between these two doctors, is a prolonged debate about the preeminence of the libido in Freud's doctrine. Later crucial scenes involve technical criticism of a dissertation/case study on the ego and repression, Freud's monograph on Moses and Ikhnaton, and an early version of the death drive.

This is a movie about ideas, about method. At the same time, it aspires to be a sexual drama, a biopic, and a story of friendship and ambition. But it is rarely both of these things at once. The "Oedipal" rivalry of the younger Jung with Herr Doktor is somewhat obvious, and these scenes write themselves. But when Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) is being spanked, or indeed the entire unfolding of her affair with Jung, there is no organic relationship with her psychoanalytic ideas. The movie might be said to be about the contours of her desire, but when she outlines her contributions to Freud, instead of thinking, "Of course YOU would think that!" instead I was confused and bored.

The filmmakers do obliquely demonstrate one theoretical point very nicely: Jung's conception of the libido theory, of "sex" as a positive force, is indeed vulgar and bourgeois--the hedonism of a frat boy. This we see only in his actions. You might say that Freud and Jung's supposed debate about the *centrality* of sex is really a debate about the meaning and limits of the word "sex." Neither of them see this, but we do. The film is also very smart about the Jewish question in pre-war German speaking countries, in relation to psychoanalysis.

What it means to have *these* ideas, and not other ones, is so central to the experience of being a person, and desire is so tangled up in metaphysics already (our "type" is an eminently Aristotelian conception), that the film suffers immensely by leaving these levels uncoordinated. Why is Jung, this prim, austere hypocrite, drawn to the theory of the unconscious in the first place? It's not clear. Why does he stray into mystical territories of study? This has nothing to do with the film's central love story. When Jung laments that psychoanalysis can only show the patient his disease, "squatting there like a toad," this is a powerful image--but it isn't coming from Jung-as-character. It is coming from some external biographical fact.

One of my brilliant readers argues that Jung's ideas about mysticism are a reflection of his refusal to pursue a life with Sabina; they are a kind of alternate fulfillment of what he cannot face and has rejected in favor of the comfortable sterility of his domestic establishment. I am unconvinced. The "person Jung could have been," in his sexual position vis-a-vis Sabina, is hardly a "mystical escape" or even an alternative. In his passionate affair, he is a brutal disciplinarian, the apotheosis of his proto-nazi "Aryan" Protestant restraint... and so not some departure or path not taken.

The way I read the "squatting there like a toad" line is that this really IS what psychoanalysis does. Jung's definition is right! The mistake is, on top of that, to then want to "give meaning" to the bare coarseness of existence. It follows, then, that it is his AFFAIR WITH SABINA that is the symptom, the "toad," the satisfaction and fantasy-formation that makes his bourgeois life bearable.

Let me recommend two better movies about psychoanalysis. The first is John Huston's Freud, with Montgomery Clift, and an early scenario written by J-P Sartre, who knew a thing or two about coordinating the dead facts of biography and oeuvre with the desires at the heart of a "project" (cf. his interminable biography of Flaubert). The second is Cronenberg's own The Brood, which treats a charismatic psychotherapists' own "dangerous method" of inducing sores and mysterious "acting-out" of the violent revenge fantasies of his patients. Without giving anything away, the ugliness of desire here culminates in the unchecked elaborating of symptoms, truly building out into the dark.

Margin Call (2011)

I have been teaching the Greek tragedies recently, and Margin Call certainly fits Jacques Lacan's definition of Sophoclean tragedy: the central characters are "between two deaths." Yes, they are walking around, breathing, stressing out. But they are dead, in the sense that all the events of their demise are known in advance. The computer models indicate that the bottom has dropped out of the mortgage market that their Wall Street firm (unnamed, but with an ingeniously bland arboreal logo) trades on. Their servants have run into Death at the marketplace. Everything is already in motion, it is only that by a stroke of luck (?) the firm realizes that the game is up before any of the other players. In Lacanian terms, the "big Other," the marketplace, is still unaware--and has to be kept unaware--of what has already taken place in "the Real" (meaning, in a very strict sense, in a computer model).

It's a great setup. But this movie isn't (until the last 20 minutes) interested in the clockwork mechanisms of Greek tragedy, or in unfolding this setup. I actually can't tell what this movie wants to be about. In very many ways (Kevin Spacey's presence not being the most obvious), we are in the David Mamet world of Glengarry Glen Ross. But Mamet's plays are about something: how men talk. I don't believe for a second that this is how Wall Street talks. The monologues in this movie are preposterous, but so are the little touches. I am reminded of a scene from the Billy Crystal movie Throw Momma From the Train, where a buffoonish aspiring writer of nautical fiction, in a story about a submarine mission, doesn't know the name for "the lever that makes the submarine dive," and so she just writes in this circumlocution. Margin Call has some of the same authenticity problems. Characters are repeatedly telling other characters to "simplify," "speak to me in plain English," "I didn't get to the top by crunching numbers." This is transparently, offensively, on my behalf as an audience member. But it takes all the fun out of the Hemingway/Mamet mode of watching Men At Work.

In economic terms, and in the terms of our political moment, this is an extremely cloistered vision--no "real people" are ever on stage--and yet not an enlightening one. We hear a lot about "formulas" and algorithms and how "complex" everything all is, but none of it seems complex at all. There is literally a character who is a rocket scientist (in a previous career), who is the only person (Nicolas Cage must have turned down this role) who sees the catastrophe coming in advance. But when he explains it, anyone who has ever watched 5 minutes of financial news will wonder how risk assessment failed to take into account historical levels of market volatility. In fact, we are in the presence of magic. David Mamet himself is much smarter here, in his film The Spanish Prisoner, where it really is a Macguffin, a "formula" with no content other than its plot function and desirability. Margin Call doesn't really want to explain finance to us. I contend that if the shoddy product being sold in this film were rotten lumber, nothing would need to be altered. What would be revealed is only that this fails at all to take me behind this particular curtain.

One learns nothing about human nature here. The main character in no way provides, what seems likely at first, a Nick Carraway-style naive moral consciousness that has to learn about the world the hard way. Instead this character disappears for long stretches. No one here is likable. No one makes a tough choice. People have tough options given to them. Unlike Greek tragedy, no one makes the interesting choice to stick it out. They are all pleading with an indifferent fate, bargaining with the sword dangling over their head. But I am making it sound more interesting than it ever is on screen. I'm sure the screenwriter/director thought that "everyone caves in" was an interesting spin, but I would not have advised trying to dramatically improve on Sophocles. Hemingway knew to show us bravery. He looked for it in more obvious places, sure. Margin Call is a failure of imagination. To nudge these characters into ethical "ownership" of their symbolic deaths, or of the mandate following necessarily from their desires, would be to create a fantasy world--no longer Wall Street, certainly. What we get instead is a dramatic stage evacuated of any content: a barren conference room marked "the present day."

[Perhaps it is trivial to say "I learned nothing about human nature from this film." But in fact I wept profusely at the trailer for the puppeteering documentary (!) "Being Elmo" during the coming attractions. There I learned that people achieve their dreams, overcome adversity, share love of others through art, and change lives through belief and passion. Margin Call annoyingly and tritely asked me to unlearn those things, and even though it was 120 minutes longer than the "Being Elmo" trailer, lost in the end.]

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, Part Two (2011)

One should be very skeptical of the well-worn cultural valuation which says that characters should "have depth" and "develop" and that emotional complications and psychological gestures are signs of great art. There are very good reasons to prefer The Pickwick Papers to Anna Karenina.

The Harry Potter series has been applauded by critics and "adults" for taking the embryonic and juvenile characters of the early novels and plunging them into an ever-darker world, showing us their growth and loves and loyalties and adolescent torments. As a reader and a viewer, this has always felt painfully obligatory and even perfunctory. It would be different if, at a deeper level, these stories were "about" adolescence, in the way that Teen Wolf or Twilight obviously are... but they aren't. Harry's problems were never mine, and the confidence he has in mission (revenging the death of his parents and destroying absolute evil) is only ever superficially challenged.

At the same time, the Harry Potter universe is so huge and cool that you can pour pretty much anything into it with a palatable result. The forgettable minor characters, the incoherent political resonances, the comic relief, the uncomfortable racial pluralism (on par with George Lucas'), the needlessly complicated lore of patronus spells and horcruxes and elder wands... none of this can overshadow the basically brilliant premise of a secret wizard world beset by a dark conspiracy.

Through everything, the most interesting thing has been seeing how the present generation is only ever living through the bitter memories, allegiances, and secrets of the last one. Snape, Dumbledore, Voldemort, and Sirius Black... this is all more lively than anything involving the Weasley twins or Cho Chang or Neville Longbottom. This last film really makes something of this (by now fairly dense) network of past survivances... but at the total cost of the Hermione/Ron element. These characters completely fall out of this last installment. Sure, they kiss. But I don't believe it for a second.

Rather, like an unstoppable behemoth, the narrative leading up to the final confrontation levels everything in its path: explanations hang in mid-air and are never taken up, emotional bonds are foreshadowed and never returned to, and the mythology (the most interesting part of the previous movie) is only confusingly alluded to. Instead, we get on one hand a lot of CGI battling, which is not well-managed enough to hold my attention--and on the other hand, a momentum-wrecking lecture by Dumbledore about the power of imagination... This is one of the worst scenes in film this year. But when it is over, we are immediately back in the action.

I guess I'm saying that the great strength of the Harry Potter universe, being JUST the universe itself, means that any narrative resolution, any climax, will not come up to the level of the conception itself. (This is what any child will tell you: they don't want to leave this world.)

But I should qualify this: one character's arc, Alan Rickman's Snape, has been riveting from start to finish, and the final revelation about his role is given appropriate attention and is the best thing in the movie. This is one of the few story lines that has persisted from installment to installment, and the closure is deeply satisfying.

Still, the franchise rests upon what is fundamentally not-story and not-character: the magic, the premise, the geography, the array of good and evil wizards, etc. Built into all of this is a Manichean conception of right and wrong that is substantially less interesting than even Star Wars. When the line is drawn in the sand, and Voldemort demands the allegiance of the Hogwarts students, only the most despicable character crosses the line to join the forces of evil.

These actors may now be able to grow facial hair, but their "world" has not grown up--the basically-decent, shopkeeping, quirky, democratic English who "don't want power" (see the last scene), versus the French-named Voldemort, the openly fascistic and self-proclaimedly evil Death Eaters, whose ideology is the world's clumsiest allegory of racism... The transparency of this obvious divide is Rowling's greatest fantasy, of course, and I wouldn't stop there: this is "bad" for our children, in a way obviously missed by Christian protesters of the novels.

Finally, we don't have "depth" or "development" here--that was covered in Part One--we have stern lectures from Dumbledore plus stuff blowing up. That these are dialectically identical should be obvious to any schoolchild: this is strictly good cop/bad cop stuff. The fantasy that we are "deeper" and more "conflicted" than our (unquestioningly ideological) enemy means that blowing stuff up is only our (regrettable) duty following from our higher conscience. In this sense, Rowling's redemption of Snape is only tossing a bone of humanism (he can cry!) to the other side: Voldemort's betrayal of Snape is the ultimate badge of honor, since Snape learns too late that he was wrong.

When I was a youngster, I would watch the last scenes of Bridge on the River Kwai and Return of the Jedi over and over: I couldn't get enough of these scenes of a suddenly conscientious act of self-destruction. "My life is worth less than what is right." This isn't a possible thought in Rowling's universe, for all of the reasons gone into above. It is, in the last reckoning, super-important that Harry live and that Snape be "taught a lesson."

Every readerly or cinematic trip to Hogwarts is also always going to school.

Bill Cunningham New York (2011)

One of the recurrent narrative elements in this character-sketch is the imminent closing down of the Carnegie Hall artist studios where the film's subject, New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, has lived for many decades. The filmmakers interview the other remaining tenants, who are a batty crew of old lady photographers and choreographers... perhaps this dying artists' colony was initially even the focus or premise of the film. We are supposed to find it a cultural tragedy that, e.g. a place where Andy Warhol or Marlon Brando once stood will soon become a corporate office, because that pays higher rent than the rent-controlled artists' studios.

But Bill Cunningham does not care about this part of his life. His studio is not a cultural landmark. It is a mess of filing cabinets, a twin bed, a couple of clothes-hangers, fashion books, and more filing cabinets. What is there to be nostalgic about? He muses that wherever he lives next will probably have a kitchen and a bathroom (his studio has neither), and his response: who needs 'em? This man does not have a "home life." Doubtless the artists' studios are a beautiful and sadly bygone idea... but Bill Cunningham treats his spartan private quarters as so much square footage. "I have never 'dined in,'" he says.

This is a man without a personal life, a workaholic. Everything that is not photographing clothes, simply doesn't exist for him. The movie provides ample fodder for a Freudian reading of sexual "sublimation"--all of his energies go HERE instead of ELSEWHERE. Yes. 100 % true. But this isn't interesting: what is interesting is that there is nothing "behind" the door marked "Bill's psyche." What is interesting is his practice; his opinions are secondary to his practice, his whole life is secondary to this practice.

Most touching moment of the film for me: everyone around Bill, including the filmmaker, is making a big deal about his having to move into a new apartment. He shrugs it off, is annoyed that this will be an inconvenience. "You can't let that interfere with your life," he says.

Hold onto that thought for a second. Isn't that the exact opposite of what we mean by "life"? Where we live, whom we live with, where our money goes, errands, our stuff... isn't that "life"? And doesn't Bill Cunningham mean... work? How could he have made such a confusion!

Many people will see this film and read it (correctly) as about journalism, or New York, or a curmudgeonly character. It's all of those things; and it is well-paced and punchy and I left the movie feeling better than I have in a long time. The line outside Film Forum has become the stuff of legend, but please brave the dreary weather and the line and go see this movie. It's all of those things... but for me, this movie is the ultimate rebuttal to something like the Youtube sensation of "The Last Lecture," or "Eat Pray Love," or any insipid bourgeois pablum about how life is about who you love, and how much you enjoy yourself, and thanks for the memories and the grandchildren. "Bill Cunningham New York" is a beautiful picture of life--I don't think you can walk away from it without accidentally saying to yourself that Bill Cunningham is an "artist"--but it is a picture of a deeply anti-social, stark, all-consuming obsession, too. What Bill is obsessed with is... life, social life, expression. What he regards is that which makes the world less dreary, more colorful--Walter Benjamin's "wide-eyed facticity" (Adorno); and like Benjamin he is a quintessential flaneur. But make no mistake: it takes an enormous amount of personal courage to live this way, and to do this work. Or: not to live, except by doing this work.

It's an exhilarating challenge on how to live, and all the more so when cast in the reflected light of fashion's ephemera, and the Heraclitean fire of the flash bulb.

Toy Story 3 (2010)

Although a number of movie sequels have been better than the original number--Bride of Frankenstein, Ivan the Terrible Part II, The Empire Strikes Back, The Wrath of Khan, The Dark Knight, and of course Toy Story 2--this is possibly the only #3 which is better than the original. Maybe this is because Toy Story 3 is under no obligation to remain in the same genre as its predecessors; in fact, the bulk of the movie is a pastiche of the classic prison-break film (with special reference to Cool Hand Luke), with healthy borrowings from the James Bond and Star Wars series. To the filmmakers' credit, these references never reach the cynical, empty allusiveness of other Disney movies, most notoriously that of Robin Williams' Genie in Aladdin. Rather, the creators seems as enamored of "movie magic" as the rest of us; witness the countless small touches that populate the mise-en-scène: Buzz Lightyear's walk, Barbie and Ken's wardrobe, the texture of a toy's yarn-hair, or the way that garbage bags are accorded much more verisimilitude than the human face. While Pixar's Wall-E was endlessly compared to Chaplin and Keaton silent films, Toy Story 3 cries out for remarks about the influence of Kubrick and Welles, masters of the painstakingly conceived minor detail.

Like the robot protagonist in Wall-E, the Toy Story films are simultaneously high-tech digital products and bearers of an imperiled, almost corny humanism, a paradox which is also a variation on the familiar media/message dialectic. On one hand, here is a series of films whose protagonist is a quaint, stitched-together cowboy doll, Woody--a relic of 1950s culture which cites Roy Rogers, Howdy Doody, and Gunsmoke--while on the other hand, the animation is produced using the most advanced 21st century computer technology by Pixar, the brainchild of Apple Computer's Steve Jobs. But at this point perhaps the paradox dissolves; after all, Apple's products really are meant to be cradled, cherished, treated like one of the family. And, once they are superseded in their technology, they don't become "obsolete"--like classic toys, they too become kitsch. But is this to say that the Toy Story films are basically feature length versions of the (already adorable and charming) Apple commercials that screen on TV or in the banners of our favorite websites?

I mention all of this, not to condemn the Toy Story films as subliminal purveyors of consumer culture, reconciling us to commodity fetishism under the premise of children's entertainment, but rather because the films are so smart that they have already envisioned and inverted this criticism. Instead of a fruitless "critique" of consumer culture and materialism--one which will in any case continue to be pursued by a spellbound postmodernism--the films eschew dwelling on what is, philosophically, a naive appropriation of facticity, and, entertainment-wise, not very promising. Toy Story instead shows how our objects think us through, or even--this is Marx's sense of "commodity fetishism"--do our thinking in our place, in the way this very "material" takes on unconsciously metaphysical, fanciful properties in the margins and traces of its movement through our social lives.

Of course, as a basic allegory, Toy Story 3 is about not about toys; it is about "us"--our culture of shoving the dying, aged, and useless out of sight. There is a unmistakable, poignant perversity in representing the plight of human mortality and aging through children's toys. At this level, it is staggeringly powerful, and I was very glad to be wearing the 3-D sunglasses when the movie was over, to hide eyes that were very red from crying. I won't make myself ridiculous by waxing on about the "complexity" of the movie's villain, a pinkish-mauve Lots-o'-Huggin stuffed bear (memorably voiced by Ned Beatty) who smells like strawberries. "Lotso's" spurned, defensive villainy, which manifest itself only as cynical, equivocating self-preservation, is one of the triumphs of recent screenwriting. The cliché would be to laud its improvement over the Manichean idea of evil found in most children's movies, from Snow White to the Harry Potter movies, but of course we learned from No Country for Old Men that "pure evil" is anything but a simple consolation, safe only for children. The best moments in the film are parallel speeches about the disposable nature of human relationships; the first speech is greeted with warm approbation by the toys (and the audience), while the second is a horrific "unmasking," dramatically scored, which leads to Lotso's downfall. But the content of the "good" and the "bad" sides of Lotso is identical.

Ultimately, while Toy Story 3 is a great and moving film, the fate of the toys--the concluding message--is unsatisfactory. The allegory has to eventually collapse back into its ostensible subject, I suppose. In the last analysis, the toys have it easy: they are there to be played with. But here I can no longer find myself in the film. Woody (Tom Hanks) has his owner's name written on the sole of his boot: his destiny is marked. And while the difficulty of living up to that responsibility, and the vicissitudes of fidelity, make for great cinema, in life our destinies are never so clearly marked (not even in crayon). And here it returns to being a "kids movie"--children don't have *this* problem. The toys can't become... anything, other than what they are. On the other hand, this--becoming other than what one is--is the entire problematic of Pixar's The Incredibles. But it really isn't a theme that could be exhausted. That these questions have been almost entirely abdicated by serious cinema--say, by the empty, pretentious formalism of Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker-- and can only be smuggled in under the floorboards, as it were, of these Disney movies, is perhaps even more troubling than anything onscreen here.

Rebecca (1940)

For those who know something of dreams, the famous opening of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940)--"Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again," intoned by our heroine (Joan Fontaine) over gauzy images of a long drive leading up to a magnificent estate--contains a subtle but foreboding surprise. The dream that we are witnessing, of a nocturnal return to Manderley, knows itself to be a delusion: the lights in the windows are only lights cast by the passing moon; the full shapes of its towers, only the aggrandizing effects of shadows. Because this is emphatically not a dream of returning to Manderley, for reasons still to be spelled out. Our anonymous heroine is in fact dreaming of--willing, fantasizing about--Manderley's ruin, its quietude as it lays in ruin, succumbing to the overgrowth of the surrounding wood. And as the scene changes, and we come face to face with the innocent, awkward narrator in earlier days, this dream of ruin becomes a curious one to impute to her fresh youthfulness. And, as dreams tend to, this one too fades away into waking life: I have watched Rebecca a number of times without registering that the opening "gives away" the ending entirely.

Rebecca was Hitchcock's first American film, produced by David O. Selznick fresh off of his success producing (but really directing, writing, and editing) Gone with the Wind (1939). Although Hitchcock had already directed two absolute classics in The Lady Vanishes (1938) and The 39 Steps (1935), the larger Hollywood budget allowed for the casting of the world's greatest living actor, Laurence Olivier, as Maximilian de Winter, as well as for the Manderley set (and its destruction) and an overall less-closeted feel than in Hitch's British films. "Maxim" de Winter is one of Olivier's best roles: a peremptory, moody, haunted Mr. Rochester figure. We first see him evidently contemplating suicide over a cliff's edge at Monte Carlo, with vertiginous images of crashing waves that Olivier would reprise to great effect in the "To be or not to be" soliloquy in his Hamlet (1948). Joan Fontaine somehow manages to seem both newborn and twitchingly neurotic as an insecure commoner whom de Winter does not so much seduce as command, liberating her from her demeaning job as a paid companion (to a scene-stealing Florence Bates) and installing her as mistress of the immense Manderley.

Or, she would be mistress of Manderley, except that the mansion is ruled by the ghost of the first Mrs. de Winter (the title character, though never seen) and the eerie, domineering housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, whose allegiances are entirely to the (apparently drowned) first wife. Here we have one of Hitchcock's great themes: the place one finds oneself occupying, which one is manifestly an impostor. Just as Roger Thornhill finds himself being chased "as" Roger Kaplan in North by Northwest (1959), or the impostor Madeleine finds herself compelled by Scottie to dress as the part she plays in the first half Vertigo (1958), or Norman Bates' role as his own mother in Psycho (1960)--though the last of these is scarily effective--the new Mrs. de Winter finds herself installed in a position, a name, and a life which have already begun. In Hitchcock, one is constantly made to acknowledge how much of our lives are willing impostures. What remains is not so much escape (where would we go?) but a battle for dignity, with what little personal force one has at one's command. If Rebecca and Vertigo especially are great films, it is because they express the truth that yes, we are compelled (by the tyrannical eccentricities of an Olivier or a James Stewart) into these ill-fitting roles, but behind this compulsion lies a palpable desperation.

A word about Mrs. Danvers. What makes this woman so terrifying? For many of us, it must be that the suspicion that "British people are really like this"--icily rude, leading us into faux pas, suffocating us with etiquette. Jokes aside, Mrs. Danvers is one of Hitchcock's great villains because her motivation, a servant's faithfulness, would otherwise so obviously be a virtue. Villains in film, if they are of the mustache-twirling variety and motivated by callow selfishness, or of the Darth Vader variety and essentially following orders, may be "bad" enough. But Mrs. Danvers, like Norman Bates, is even scarier: these villains have set up inside themselves that to which they are faithful and of which they are so protective (the first Mrs. de Winter, Mrs. Bates), but with no distinction between "outside" and "inside." The location of evil here, really terrifying evil--and this expressed at the height of Nazi power in Europe--is not blind obedience to an external power, or hateful intolerance, but rather more subtly, the voice of conscience and secure continuity that we set up inside ourselves, what Freud would call the superego. And so it is fitting that it is in dreams of returning to Manderley that even the meek heroine of Rebecca repeatedly secures and masters the end of Rebecca's reign, as though even absolute ruin and decay were still a rather tenuous victory.